The Valley of Unknowing

by Sington, Philip

  After Theresa’s phone call, all I could think about was the profile in Stern magazine and how I could get hold of a copy. The challenge was daunting. Of the day-to-day items produced in wasteful abundance by the capitalist West, newspapers and magazines were the hardest to come by in the East. They were not carried in the Intershops for ideological reasons and even women’s magazines, glossy publications whose principal subject matters were dieting, clothes, make-up and sex, were eschewed as a source of unfavourable lifestyle comparisons (Pramo, our own most popular women’s magazine, necessarily adopted a practical approach to fashion, invariably including pattern charts for do-it-yourself couture). The safest way of seeing for myself what Theresa’s agent considered so significant would have been to exploit my official contacts. A suitably framed request to the Cultural Association might have borne fruit eventually. But I was in too much of a hurry for that. Instead I turned to Frau Helwig, the timid spinster of the lachrymose lavatory, who I had some reason to hope could be bullied.

  Besides tending her allotment, Frau Helwig’s other lurid passion was needlework. She knitted prodigiously and when she wasn’t knitting she was embroidering or crocheting. Most of the moveable objects in her draughty flat had been fitted with some kind of decorative cosy; not just the obvious candidates – teapots, cushions, hot-water bottles – but mugs, door handles (to impede the draughts whistling through the keyholes), plant pots, photograph albums, the arms of her armchairs and the headrest of her bed. Many of the patterns – ducks aloft were a favoured pictorial theme – came from magazines and it was here that I saw my chance: the magazines in question were Western and came in the post from an elderly cousin outside Hamburg. This much Frau Helwig had confessed to me when I came across them on one of my reparative visits, carefully stacked inside a hollow bath stool.

  Crochet Today, Needlepoint, World of Yarn, The Knitter, these publications could hardly have been more innocuous, politically speaking. If anything, the subliminal message of textile self-sufficiency had a Marxian flavour, harking back to a pre-capitalist golden age, when the slavery of industrial mass production had not yet parted the working man from the fruits his labour. But what was to stop Frau Helwig’s cousin slipping in a few pages from Stern among the usual patterns and handy hints – apart, that is, from Frau Helwig’s terror of official displeasure and the faint possibility of arrest?

  ‘Stern?’ the old woman said, as she shut the door behind us. I had caught up with her as she was returning from the shops and was at that moment carrying her shopping bag. ‘I’ve never heard of that magazine. Is it about astronomy?’

  Stern in German means ‘star’. Perhaps in Frau Helwig’s utilitarian world – the world of The Knitter and Crochet Today – magazine titles were only ever literal and descriptive. Either that, or she was sounding me out.

  ‘Not exclusively,’ I said. ‘It’s more what they call general interest.’

  The old lady frowned. She was, as ever, anxious to be obliging. In the time it had taken us to get up the stairs she had recounted a long list of plumbing and heating irregularities, menaces that worried her no end ‘what with winter on its way’. I could sympathise: her flat was cold and draughty at the best of times.

  ‘The thing is, Helga lives in quite a small town,’ she said, watching me as I placed an investigatory ear against the old iron radiator in the hallway. ‘I doubt if they’d have much of a selection in the local shop.’

  I assured her that Stern enjoyed a wide circulation. ‘I’m only really interested in one particular article. It should be in the next edition. A profile. An old acquaintance of mine, by the name of Aden. She writes on cultural matters.’

  ‘Well. How interesting.’

  ‘I think so. If you write to your cousin now, she’ll be sure not to miss the next edition. I can post the letter for you. I hate to beg a favour, but I’ve nowhere else to turn.’ I handed Frau Helwig a scrap of paper upon which the details had already been written. ‘Tell your cousin it would be best to cut the article out. I really don’t want the rest of the magazine and it’ll reduce the cost of postage.’

  I insisted on this rudimentary precaution, not to protect Frau Helwig, but to increase the chances that the item would actually arrive. Ideologically dubious correspondence had a habit of going missing, especially when sent from abroad. Superior brands of chocolate fared little better.

  Unfortunately Frau Helwig, for all her years, was not stupid. She squinted at the paper in her hand, eyes narrowing. ‘Shall I tell Helga that the article’s for you?’ she said. ‘She’ll be sure to pull her finger out if she hears that. She’s always been a fan of yours, Herr Krug.’

  The purpose of this suggestion, I realised, was to ensure that any blame arising from her request could be credibly directed at me.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘If you think it’ll help.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it will.’

  I took an adjustable spanner from my jacket and tapped the in-pipe, like a doctor testing for reflexes. ‘Your system needs flushing out. It’s in danger of seizing up. I’d better go and get my tools.’

  In this way a transaction was completed, the true nature of which remained implicit, neither party having openly acknowledged it. In that sense it was no different from many thousands of transactions taking place every day in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State, where the more weighty and significant a need, the more it touched upon the innermost desires and the deepest fears, the more likely it was to remain unspecified.

  40

  In the interval that followed Frau Helwig’s domestic heating arrangements received the kind of pastoral care normally reserved for sick and dying relatives. I visited every day, ostensibly to check up on the health of the boiler and the circulatory flow of the radiative system; in reality to see whether cousin Helga the Hamburger had done as she was asked and mailed the profile in Stern. After a week or so of pointless plumbing my persistence was rewarded. The day before Theresa was due to visit from Berlin a letter arrived. I was too impatient to wait until I got home. I examined the contents in the privacy of Frau Helwig’s dingy lavatory, on the pretext of inspecting the cistern, my heavy toolbox blocking the door.

  Frau Helwig’s cousin had not sent what you would normally call a cutting. A typical cutting is not five pages long, and does not open with a photographic double-page spread across which is written the headline: PROFITS OF DOOM. It is also customary to preserve, where possible, the name and date of the publication, which typically appears in small type at the bottom of each page. In this case all the folios had been trimmed off. A large panel on the last page had also been excised, doubtless because an advertisement had been displayed there, Western advertisements being regarded as more or less politically corrosive depending on the product, and whether an equivalent was available in the East. It seemed cousin Helga was not naive when it came to sending printed matter across the inner German border. Stripped of contextual orientation, the article could have been mistaken, at least by a casual observer, for one in Needlepoint or World of Yarn.

  The photographs revealed a startlingly modern and spacious house: polished wooden flooring, a raised fireplace with logs blazing, white walls decorated with tasteful abstract art (bold yet balanced, striking but never garish). The furniture was bound in what looked like suede, perpendicular in form and low, as if to avoid cluttering up the sight lines. One wall was made entirely of glass. Beyond it lay immature autumnal woodland and a stretch of sunlit water. In one corner of the room, on a marble plinth, stood a bronze statuette of a female nude with outstretched wings.

  This, it transpired, was not the Aden dwelling. It belonged to Martin Klaus, whom the article described as ‘one of a new breed of super-agent’. (The article did not reveal where or how the breeding took place; I assumed in secret laboratories at the Swiss Ministry of Culture.) It was located on the north shore of the Zürichsee in a place called Erlenbach. Reportedly Erlenbach was ‘exclusive’.

  Aden’s is a beguiling but
strangely unsettling presence. Demure but watchful, engaging but reticent, there is always a sense that she is holding something back, that her soul perhaps abides elsewhere.

  ‘Survivors is a haunted, traumatised novel, a dark vision, a lament,’ says Klaus. ‘When I first met Eva, I thought there had been a mistake. How could someone so delightful have written something so traumatic? It’s only as I’ve got to know her that I’ve begun to perceive the complexity within.’

  Klaus was older than I’d expected – possibly my age, within a year or two – but unbookishly tanned and heavily built. In the opening spread he sat perched on the back of a sofa, dressed in a blue suit and an unbuttoned shirt, over which peeped a curl of manly thoracic hair. He wasn’t looking at the camera, but at Theresa, who stood a few feet away beside the fireplace. She wore jeans and a flowing purple blouse that left one shoulder bare (no bra strap in evidence, I noted). The agent looked at the writer, the writer looked at us. He sat, she stood, her hands hidden behind her, as if bound. At first glance the geometry of the scene was unambiguous: Theresa was the performer, the centre of interest; Klaus, like us, was in the audience, a mere advocate. But on closer inspection, other connotations suggested themselves: the advocate was also a connoisseur; and that made the writer an objet d’art, a creation just as much as a creator. She added lustre to his already impressive collection.

  I had never much liked the sound of Martin Klaus. The way Theresa quoted him in every conversation – Martin says this, Martin says that – suggested she saw him more as a mentor than a business associate. And his utterances seemed obsessively focused on the market; how to please it, tame it, exploit it, as if that were a writer’s only possible concern. That the man was successful, at least in his own terms, was undeniable. His lakeside villa alone established that fact. But he was also an interloper and a fool. For hadn’t he been taken in like everyone else?

  I turned the pages, squinting at the text as I perched on the seat of Frau Helwig’s ancient Klo, absorbing the moneyed ambience of Switzerland, drinking in the story. Apparently, before Klaus had even finished reading Survivors, he had jumped into his vintage Alfa Romeo and raced down the Autobahn to Linz, arriving unannounced outside the Aden household, Theresa having omitted to include her telephone number in the covering letter.

  Dinner followed at a nearby schloss. Within half an hour Klaus had, in his own words, ‘proposed’.

  ‘I went down on one knee – quite literally – and begged Eva to be my client,’ he recalls.

  ‘It was flattering and actually rather romantic,’ Aden says, ‘in a funny kind of way. Everyone in the restaurant was looking at us. When I said yes, the waiters brought us complimentary champagne.’

  Since that day the happy creative couple have enjoyed a fairy tale honeymoon. In the publishing world, Survivors was one of the season’s most hotly contested titles, Aden herself appearing prominently in the advance publicity. Early sales have lived up to expectations. Though US publication is still some months away, the calls from Hollywood have already begun.

  On the third page was another photograph, shot outdoors in black and white. It had been taken on a different occasion. Klaus was sitting on the grass wearing a polo shirt and sunglasses, holding papers in one hand, gesticulating with the other. Theresa lay opposite him on her stomach, holding a wine glass.

  ‘Success and fame can suffocate a young talent,’ Klaus explains. ‘Everywhere there are siren voices and unhelpful distractions. Part of my role in Eva’s life is to act as a confidant, a father-confessor and a sounding board. If ever Eva has questions or doubts, I want her to come to me first.’

  Part of his role. Part. What about the rest of it? And why was there never any mention of a Frau Klaus? The agent was apparently unattached. If so, why? Was he impotent? Was he homosexual? Worse, was he an habitual playboy, a man for whom the comforts of marriage were a poor substitute for unbridled promiscuity?

  Where Eva Aden goes from here is a subject of the utmost delicacy, creatively and commercially. There are rumours of a sequel to Survivors, which neither Aden nor Klaus was prepared to confirm. ‘Eva has more great novels in her – I’m sure of that,’ Klaus says. ‘But I don’t want her embarking on another major work just because everyone is egging her on, or because there’s money to be made. She needs to work at her own pace and in her own time. Right now she’s experimenting with the short story form and I’m encouraging her in that.’

  The short story form? I had to laugh. There wasn’t much money in short stories – the experimental kind least of all. Short stories were written for love and for practice. Short stories were where writers began. But as a presentational ploy, I had to admit it was ingenious. It projected seriousness and long-term ambition, while defusing the charge of exploitation that was bound to accompany a sequel. Where had my sweet Theresa acquired such casual, skilful mendacity? And from whom?

  A new thought, disturbing but seductive, occurred to me: what if it wasn’t a lie? What if Theresa was experimenting with the short story form because she planned to become a writer for real? What if the life of the viola player – the difficulty, the obscurity, the scant reward – was no longer enough? How many times had I heard her complain about it? How many times had she seemed on the verge of giving up? I remembered the last time we spoke: I’m not sure there’s much point in practising any more.

  I stood up, banging my skull on the overhead light. Once established in her own right, she would have no further need of me. No more keeping Bruno happy; no more tedious sojourns in the suffering East. I would have given her what she needed, what every new writer needs: an audience. The freshly liberated Eva Aden, feminist visionary, could manage the rest for herself.

  I took deep breaths to slow my racing heart. The scenario was fantastical. It couldn’t possibly be true. To give Eva Aden her own literary career would mean appropriating Survivors for ever, safe in the knowledge that I would never be in a position to reclaim it. Theresa, my Theresa, would never have done that to me – even if, through some unimaginable chance, she had discovered that the book had never been mine in the first place.

  There was one more photograph, smaller than the others, hidden away on the last page. Theresa was at a signing, stationed behind a table, either side of her copies of Survivors piled shoulder high. She sat, pen in hand, sandwiched between the two towering manifestations of her deception – themselves a fraction of the warehousefuls of fraud already fanning out across the globe. The camera had caught her looking daunted, bewildered. I expect she was thinking: what have I done? Klaus was standing behind her, stooping solicitously, as if he too had noticed something wrong. A steadying hand, blurred by motion, was on its way to Theresa’s left deltoid. The other hand was already resting on the opposite shoulder, close enough to her neck for the thumb to be invisible beneath her hair. How long had it been there, I wondered, that proprietorial digit? How natural had such caresses become?

  I stared at the picture and it was if the editors at Stern were sending me a covert message. Look at her, look at him. What is the relationship here? What do you think?

  I sat down again. Did Klaus know everything? Of course he did. Either Theresa had told him, or he had guessed. Either way, he was not the fool in this equation. I was the fool. I had sent Theresa out into a world I didn’t understand, a world where Klaus and his kind were in charge; and they had taken charge – of her. They had done more than give her a new name. They had remade her from the heart up.

  Above my head the light bulb fizzled and went out. I was in darkness.

  After I don’t know how long, Frau Helwig rapped on the door. ‘Is everything all right, Herr Krug?’

  She sounded scared.

  41

  The wind was in the west the day she returned, a strong wind that purged the air of smoke and dust, and sent the arboreal debris of the late departed summer spiralling down the streets. The tramway power lines bucked and swayed, sending showers of sparks through the air. On my way to the central ra
ilway station I saw men at a restoration site scurrying for cover as a tarpaulin broke free from the scaffolding, loose ropes flailing like whips. I went to the bridge on Budapester Strasse, which crosses over the tracks, and watched the trains trundle in and out of the terminal building, their clatter and screech barely audible over the gusting wind. I was afraid they might close the line. I was afraid Theresa wouldn’t come. If the weather was wild down here, what would it be like up on the hills? In the event the line stayed open. Theresa did come. But it was to be her last visit. The valley was never to see her again.

  I waited hopefully. I still believed that the business with Richter’s fiction would not trouble us for long. Books are ephemeral. In all but the rarest of cases their season is brief. Survivors would be forgotten soon enough, and so would its author and all questions relating to its authorship. Theresa and I would look back on it as an amusing detour in the shared journey of our lives. With this in mind, I had decided to waste no more time in proposing marriage. This, it seemed to me, was one thing I could offer her that Martin Klaus never would. Klaus was a collector of beautiful things, but the last thing a collector wanted was to be collected. For him the exclusivity inherent in marriage was repellent, a limitation on the very basis of his self-expression. Whatever the current status of the Klaus-Aden alliance, my proposal would expose its limitations and its weakness. So it was that in compliance with the inverted logic of love, I set out to make Theresa Aden my wife at the very time when I was least assured of her affection.